The Strange Little Girl (1911)

When I was paging through issues of The Lotus-Circle Messenger, a children's theosophical magazine which began in 1930 and was renamed in 1936 as The Junior Theosophist and Lotus-Circle Messenger, I was intrigued to see this advertisement in the December 1932 issue:

The first book listed, The Coming of the King (1901), was written and illustrated by Reginald Machell (1854-1927), a friend and collaborator with Morris. Machell was an early resident at the Point Loma community, and had lived there for several years before Morris arrived in January 1908.

The fourth title especially interested me, as it claims to be a short book by Kenneth Morris entitled The Strange Little Girl. But researching this later, I learned that it was not published with Morris's name on it, but merely with the byline "V.M." Is the story by Morris, or did someone who made the advertisement confuse Morris's initials (K.V.M.) with those of someone else? That appears to be the case, for The Strange Little Girl, published in 1911, seemed to have been written by Vredenburgh Minot.

Minot (1887-1928) was from a notable Boston family. His maternal aunt was Dr. Gertrude van Pelt (1856-1947), a physician and a high-level theosophist in the Point Loma Community. Both Vredenburgh's parents were dead by 1900, and in 1905 he spent several weeks visiting his aunt before going to study at Harvard University. Minot was part of the Harvard Class of 1909, but according to the history of that Class, Minot withdrew during or at the end of his junior year.  He settled in Point Loma, and quickly became involved in many activities there. He studied at the Raja-Yoga Academy, where his instructor in literature and history was Kenneth Morris.

Vredenbugh Minot married Hazel Oettl (1889-1969) in December 1917. Minot contributed to The Theosophical Path and The Raja-Yoga Messenger, and was on the editorial staff of the latter at the time of his death, from complications of a heavy attack of influenza, in December 1928.  The Theosophical Path for February 1929 devoted five pages to his memory, including testimonials from colleagues and friends. Kenneth Morris contributed a verse valedictory that was read out at the services and printed in the magazine. Oddly, though, there is no mention at all of the publication of The Strange Little Girl, which was apparently his only book. 

And what of the book itself?  It is a fairy tale, at the beginning, of a young princess named Eline,and it quickly moves on with an allegorical progression of her soul as it gains knowledge and influence.  An interesting tale, in some ways like some by Kenneth Morris, but it also shares a lot of traits with other theosophical fiction of the time period. You can read a copy here. 

Kenneth Morris and the Problem of Pseudonyms

Kenneth Morris left no bibliography of his writings, which were published in a large number of theosophical magazines from the mid-1890s on past Morris's death in 1937 and into the 1940s. The making of such a bibliography is greatly complicated by Morris's use of pseudonyms, which he used on his fiction as well as on his poetry and other writings. Some of the pseudonyms are easily decipherable as variations on his name or initials. His earliest writings were signed as by “Ceinydd Morus”—a Welsh form of his name.  Later this became “Cenydd Morus.”  Also he used the initials C.M. [on poetry], and K.V.M.—the V. standing for his middle name, Vennor. Otherwise he used a number of pseudonyms, listed alphabetically below. At least one is decipherable:  C. ApArthur can be decoded as C [for Cenydd]  Ap [Welsh “son of”] Arthur [Kenneth’s father’s name]. The name “Quintus Reynolds” appeared on early work (mostly poetry or essays) and then reappeared nearly two decades later on fiction.

In the 1940s, the first attempt at noting all of Morris's stories was made by George Simpson, who collected some twenty-six stories. Simpson was doubtless aided by the fact of Morris's 1926 collection, The Secret Mountain and Other Tales, which contains ten stories, most of which previously appeared under various pseudonyms. But Simpson's compilation was by no means comprehensive, and it includes four items that may or may not have been by Morris. Three were bylined “Stanley Fitzpatrick”—but Stanley Fitzpatrick was an actual person whom Morris knew at Point Loma, an elderly woman, who rarely published anything, and who died in her eighties at Point Loma in 1928.  Might she have broken her decades of publishing silence in 1914-1918 to publish three rather Morrisian short stories that George Simpson thought were by Morris? Or might Morris have had a hand in encouraging her or in influencing her by his example?  The truth is probably unrecoverable.  But if one accepts the three short stories as by Morris, then one must also accept the serialized sixteen-chapter theosophical novel published under the same name during the same time period. I will discuss the Stanley Fitzpatrick stories in detail in the future, but for the present, their existence exemplifies some of the difficulties in ascribing any pseudonymous writings to Morris. It is also worth noting that there are a large number of mythological and fantasy stories in these theosophical magazines for the decades in which Morris contributed his stories. Some of these stories are anonymous, or signed with initials (that may or may not be identifiable with other members of the Point Loma theosophical community). It is problematic to attribute many of them to Morris.

Kenneth J. Zahorsky and Robert H. Boyer published a much fuller Morris bibliography in 1981, but there were still a good number of theosophical magazines that they hadn't been able to examine. And since then I have built upon their work, and added considerably to the Morris bibliography by examining these rare magazines. A number of early Morris stories were revealed and reprinted in The Dragon Path: Collected Tales of Kenneth Morris (1995), and since then I have found four additional stories that I feel certain were authored by Kenneth Morris, one even being under his own name.


Kenneth Morris's known pseudonyms (used on fiction only):

C. ApArthur. [Three instances, 1915-1917]  C [for Cenydd]  Ap [Welsh “son of”] Arthur [Kenneth’s
               father’s name]
Walshingham Arthur [1929]
Aubrey Tyndall Bloggsleigh [1919]
Floyd C. Egbert [Two instances 1917-1918]
F. McHugh Hilman [1916]
Ambrosius Kesteven [1919]
Maurice Langran [1917]
Fortescue Lanyard [1917]
Vernon Lloyd-Griffiths [1917]
K.V.M.  [Three instances 1899-1921]
Hankin Maggs [1916]
Jefferson D. Malvern [1916]
Patton H. Miffkin [1918]
Bingham T. Molyneux [1930]
Sergius Mompesson [1915]
Kenneth Morris [Eight instances, 1922-1933]
Ceinydd Morus [Six instances 1899-1902]
Cenydd Morus [Three instances 1914-1917]
Even Gregson Mortimer [1917]
Ephraim Soulsby Paton [1915]
Quintus Reynolds [Two instances 1915]
Evan Snowdon [1917]
Wentworth Tompkins [1916] 
Thomson J. Wildredge [1915]

Caermarthen by Kenneth Morris

A Glimpse of Caermarthen, Wales

The men are fishermen; the things on their backs are their boats, which they carry about on land like that. But you needn’t feel sorry for them; because boats are not a bit heavy. They are coracles; and if only you understood Welsh I should put in here a poem about them, called Hen Gwrwg fy Ngwlad, to show you how poetic those queer tortoise-looking things are when you know them. They are really baskets, with a hide stretched over the outside to keep out the water; they have been in use in Wales for two thousand years at least, since (I think) Julius Caesar mentions them; and probably they were in use there thousands of years before that. They sit right on the surface of the shallow Welsh rivers, drawing no depth at all, and skim about like water-flies: upstream driven by the fisherman’s paddle, downstream with the swift current; and the chances are that the first time you go in one, in about one minute you are enjoying a beautiful swim; because one small wrong motion, and over the coracle goes.

Now you might think that people who still use a kind of boat their fathers were using thousands of years ago, are ‘primitive savages,’ so to speak; but nothing of the kind! Very likely one of these very men has won a prize for a poem or essay in the Eisteddfod,—which means ‘session’: it is the session of the bards, at which people compete for musical and literary prizes, and the one whose poem is adjudged the best becomes a kind of national hero for the following year. How ‘high-falutin’ the word bard sounds! But in Welsh it is the common word for anyone who goes in for writing things that aren’t sermons or scientific books or journalism; it doesn’t even neces­sarily mean a poet at all. It is one of the very few Welsh words that have come into English; and then it had to come through Latin first.

As for the river, it is the Tywi, or as the English spell it, Towy. It is one of the largest rivers in Wales; and as it is quite near the sea at this point—you may form your own conclusions as to the size of Welsh rivers. In fact the Tywi is only thirty miles long: but you can crowd heaps of poetry and legends and fairies and things like that into thirty miles. And history too, for that matter.

The town behind is Caermarthen. It looks ugly enough, because of that building at the back: once there was a castle there, but now it is a prison. You would never think that a town like that could have been the home of, and named after, the most famous Enchanter of European legend; but it is: for Caermarthen is a corruption of Caerfyrddin, which means the City of Myrddin,—whose name the Normans couldn’t pronounce, so they made it into Merlin. Now Merlin is supposed to have lived in the time of Arthur; and Arthur is supposed to have lived in the sixth century A. D. But the curious thing is that long before that there was a Roman town at Caer­marthen; and it, too, went by the same name: it was called in Latin Maridunum, which was merely the Latin corruption of the native Britonic or Welsh name. So that looks as if Merlin really lived a long time before the Romans conquered Britain.

A few miles from the town is the cave in which he lies dreaming or enchanted; a Faery Lady put spells on him, so that he might not die, but go to sleep for ages, and never be lost to the world. So I suppose he will awake sometime, and begin his grand enchantments again.

Countries are like men: they must go to sleep sometimes, or they would get tired out and die. When that happens, the people stop progressing; they can no longer unite, or undertake new projects; they only want to be left alone and have a quiet time, and make little wars among themselves, and not be governed or anything. So generally they get conquered by some neighboring people that happens to be awake. In such sleeping countries­ you very often hear of ancient heroes and magicians who are said to be dreaming under some mountain or in some cave, waiting for the time when they must wake and lead their people to great things again. In Wales there are at least four such enchanted sleepers: Arthur, and Myrddin, and Owen Glyndwr, and another man called Owen Redhand, who was a son of the last Prince of Wales, and who became, after the conquest, a great captain in the French navy; Froissart tells you about him. Perhaps it means really the Soul of the Nation; which goes into the Hidden World when the nation falls asleep; and then, after centuries, when the time comes, and the people are ready, it comes forth again.

Kenneth Morris

The Raja-Yoga Messenger, July 1920